All things BDiddy.

Here’s the thing. All the ACC games count the same. It doesn’t matter whether they’re played in early January or early March, they count the same in the standings. But you wouldn’t know that by the brand of basketball that’s being played right now. With tournament spots on the line, you see a fierceness on the court that’s simply not there in January. Did you catch Duke-FSU the other night? An unbelievable game! Even in a loss at Cameron, Toney Douglas throws up 27 with Duke defenders hanging on his jersey all night. And then there’s Virginia Tech last night…giving Carolina fits until the last few minutes of the game. Tech really has no business hanging with UNC’s talent level. But what an effort. The ACC boys are ballin’ right now. And I love every minute of it.

So enjoy Jeff Teague’s crazy sick dunk at the top, and enjoy the one below by my boy Gerald Henderson. And bring on that game Sunday at the Dean Dome.

Look, this is probably not that big of a deal to most people. But since my Carolina friends love to point out how Coach K is the devil and has the foulest mouth in the ACC and screams at everyone through all our games, I just needed to bring a bit of attention to this.

850 The Buzz Blog describes the incident last night with UNC Coach Roy Williams at his radio show taping :

Nothing gets Williams riled up quite like questioning whether or not he has thought of something. That’s exactly what happened when local writer Andrew Jones pushed Williams on why his veteran guys still “stink” at certain defensive skills.

“If I knew the answer to that, do you still think we’d be $#&%-ing stinking? Everybody strike that f-word, I meant to say ‘frickin.’ Seriously, if you think I could figure it out, don’t you think I would do it?”

Williams apologized profusely once the press conference wrapped up. Everyone just chuckled, and Woody Durham threw it back to the crew saying “he better apologize to Wanda.” Rimshot! Admittedly, not everyone found it funny. Apparently WRAL’s Jeff Gravely took Williams to task by saying, “Coach, you can’t strike live interviews.” What, did you guys blow your cash on all the nifty HD technology and not have enough for a 7-second delay machine?

While we had our fun with it this morning, let the record show Williams leads Mike Krzyzewski in over-the-air post game obscenities. In addition to the infamous Bonnie Bernstein “I could give a $#!& about North Carolina” quote, the score is currently 2-0. Which is funny, because North Carolina fans sure are prudish when it comes to Coach K’s filthy mouth during games. More specifically, the 1989 ACC Tournament game where K told Dean Smith to eff himself. Williams? Not exactly free from original sin like some fans believe. Gasp…he’s human.”

“Carolina played great. And we didn’t play poorly, we played hard. I thought overall we played well, but we’re not as good as they are right now. They’re better than us, and sometimes a team that’s better doesn’t play as well as that, but they played that way too. It’s going to be difficult to beat them. We just have to keep getting better. We’ve come a long away from last Wednesday and we just have to keep improving.”

I don’t have too much more to add…except that I was disappointed one of our guys didn’t step up and keep the game closer. You just can’t go through a scoring drought like we did against a good team like Carolina and expect to win. I thought Gerald had a golden opportunity to assert himself…especially when Danny Green went out in the second half with his third foul. For that matter, I believe that most of our guys (Kyle, Jon, Greg, Nolan) are fully capable of being the aggressor and literally changing the direction of the game. So all you can hope is that our guys get stronger from this. And next time around, they step up instead of out of the spotlight. Let’s do it all over again in a month, right?

A couple of weeks ago, I felt pretty good about this game. We weren’t playing great offensively, but our defense was good enough to get us by. And whether it was Gerald, Jon, or Kyle…someone would always step up in the second half to seal the win. I’m not beating my chest and saying I knew we’d beat Carolina. But I did feel pretty good about our matchups. And we always seem to play them tough, anyway.

Tonight, I have no idea what to expect. Last week, a Duke team I’ve never seen before showed up at Clemson and took a deserved beating. And this past Saturday, only a gutsy performance by Greg Paulus saved us from losing to Miami. So I have many questions about tonight. How will Nolan handle getting booted from the starting lineup? He could respond like a man and have the game of his life off the bench. Defensively, he’s capable of locking Lawson up. But he could also go into a deep, dark hole. Will Kyle finally bust out of his month-long shooting slump? Will our wing players settle for jump shots and threes all night? Or will we force the issue and take it to the rack like the great Duke teams of the past? Will we learn from the Clemson loss and step up to the challenge of beating a great Carolina team?